Brad Thor - State Of The Union

Harvath knew the message was a lie; that he should not listen to it. He closed his mind against the darkness and tried to focus on his breathing. He needed to slow his heart rate and respiration. The ship’s crew was probably already working on restoring power and they would have breathable air again soon.Breathable air. He kept repeating the words to himself until the darkness of hypoxia finally overtook him.

There were strange, unintelligible words followed by a burst of heat in his lungs. Then silence. Soon, another burst followed, accompanied by more words and a heaviness on his chest. A bright light drifted on the edges of his field of vision.

The hot burst came again, but there was also another sensation, something soft, something moist. It reminded Harvath of water and he suddenly remembered that he was thirsty. He went to lick his lips but the moistness quickly receded.

He drew another breath and realized what was happening.He was breathing. As Harvath greedily gasped for air, consciousness slowly returned. He heard voices, women’s voices. The words that had been so unintelligible only moments before now found their place in his mind-Russian. The light he had seen was a flashlight held by one of the women as her compatriot attended to the other men in the room. Slowly, he sat up as he continued to suck in great gasps of air.

“Are you okay?” said a voice in English as a beam of light shone in his face. Harvath recognized the voice as Alexandra’s.

“I think so,” replied Harvath as he tried to stand up. “How did you find us?”

“I didn’t,” replied Alexandra, handing him a bottle of water she had found in one of the adjacent storage rooms. “Raisa did. She knows the ship inside and out.”

“Is she one of the scientists?”

“Yes. She was also Nesterov’s mistress, but they kept it an absolute secret.”

“Is she…” panted Harvath, who paused to take another long draught of water.

“The second scientist my father mentioned?” said Alexandra, finishing the thought for him. “No question. She told me about periodic communications she had with him.”

Harvath lowered the bottle and as he wiped his mouth along his sleeve, glanced around the room and took in the rest of the team in their various states of recovery. “What about Stavropol?”

“Everyone is going crazy upstairs over the half-empty demolitions bag Carlson was found with. All of the lower decks near where they found him are being searched for bombs he may have planted. We have to get out of here.”

“What about in the control room?”

“Something has gotten into the system,” offered Raisa. “They can’t figure it out. They think it might be a worm.”

“Not a worm,” coughed DeWolfe, as Harvath handed him the bottle of water, “a logic bomb.”

“Alogic bomb? How did you get in?”

“The schematics Dr. Nesterov had hidden in the church showed the location of a remote access terminal. Your system is completely self-contained, so it had to be hacked from within. Dr. Nesterov knew this and programmed a code into the operating system that would provide access whether or not the user had an established account. All it took was the password.”

Raisa couldn’t believe what she was hearing. Nesterov had never discussed this with her. “But we have safeguards. We constantly do cleanups of the system to remove any such backdoors.”

“By removing the source code for the compiler and then recompiling it, right?”

“Exactly.”

“That was the genius of what Dr. Nesterov did. He set it up so that each time a cleanup happened, the compiler surreptitiously plugged the code right back in. It just kept perpetuating itself. If you knew where to look, the backdoor was wide open. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be able to find any trace of it in the source codes. It’s totally invisible. Quite a moby hack if I do say so myself.”

“What’s the purpose of your logic bomb?”

“I downloaded something onto your system that the geeks at Fort Meade like to call theHungry Hungry Hippo. Right now it is grazing through your entire system, gobbling up everything it comes across.”

“But,” said Raisa, “after they isolate your bomb, they’ll just shut the system down and reboot.”

“By that time,” rasped Morrell, “there won’t be anything left to reboot. But right now, I agree with Alexandra, we need to get the hell out of here.”

Raisa led them down a long corridor and through a series of steel bulkheads. “What happened to you?” Harvath asked Alexandra as they continued to move.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” she replied.

“Did Stavropol do anything to you?”

“I said I don’t want to talk about it.”

Before Harvath could press the point any further, they arrived at a steep metal staircase. Raisa fished underneath it and pulled out Scot’s technical pack and Carlson’s demo sack. “I believe these are yours,” she said as she handed them over.

“Where did you find this?” asked Harvath.

“The head of the security team left them in his office for safekeeping.”

“And in the rush, he just left his door wide open?”

“Nobody trusts anyone aboard this ship. All of the doors are always locked.”

“Then how’d you get in?”

“The same way I got into Stavropol’s cabin to free Alexandra,” smiled Raisa as she held up a ring of keys. “You’d be surprised how careless the ship’s engineers can be with their property.”

Harvath removed the silenced Walther, the Pit Bull, and the silenced H amp;K from his backpack. “This is the extent of our firepower at the moment. Now all we need to do is to come up with some sort of diversion that will allow us to get out of here.”

“I’ll bet I could figure out a way to get a nice warm fire going,” replied Carlson as he pulled a roll of det cord from his sack.

As Carlson prepared to ignite their diversion, Alexandra said to Harvath, “Scot, you need to see this.”

“Later,” he replied.

“Fifteen seconds,” called out Carlson.

“No, you need to see it now.”

Harvath glanced at the notebooks she was examining, which she had taken from Stavropol’s stateroom. Wedged in between the pages was a picture of him with his head circled in red with crosshairs through it. There was no question of where it had been taken.

“From what I can tell,” said Alexandra, “Draegar was given a copy of this photo along with your home address.”

“Now that I know he’s coming, I’ll have to rush back and bake a cake for him,” replied Harvath.

“Time to move,” commanded Carlson, cutting off any further conversations as he popped the sparks at the bottom of his time fuse coils.

Harvath grabbed the photo and shoved it into his pocket as Alexandra gathered up the journals and everyone headed for the gangway. Outside, they formed a conga line with Morrell and Carlson on point, and Avigliano covering their six. The goal now was to reach the helicopter, which Morrell was qualified enough to pilot. They had only needed the Russian pilot to fly the chopper from Archangel City and handle any radio traffic on the way in, but now that they were on their way out, Alexandra could handle any radio inquiries and hopefully weave enough bullshit to protect them until they got to the border with Norway and were safely out of Russian airspace.

They weren’t even halfway amidships when they ran into their first problem. Carlson, wearing the night vision goggles that had been in Harvath’s pack, spotted movement up ahead and held up his fist, indicating that the column should stop. “Contact,” he whispered, as he raised Alexandra’s silenced Walther P4 and pointed it down the corridor.